


Breaths

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Backstory, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Pre-Rogue One, gray or demisexual Baze, mostly angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-28 01:23:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10061642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: Baze is always counting his own breaths in the dark belly of the ship. They are short and rapid and anxious. There is no peace here, which is fine because Baze is convinced that peace has no place for him anymore. Peace disappeared in the moment that he walked out of the door in the middle of the night, leaning into the cold Jedhan wind, escaping from a life that had loved him warmly with two hands and looked into him with blue eyes even if they were blind in the normal sense of the word.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rockcandyshrike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rockcandyshrike/gifts).



> I blame this one on solidly on listening to "Blue Lips" by Regina Spektor after a comment on a previous fic. As such there are a LOT of blue references in this one.

Baze is always counting his own breaths in the dark belly of the ship. They are short and rapid and anxious. There is no peace here, which is fine because Baze is convinced that peace has no place for him anymore. Peace disappeared in the moment that he walked out of the door in the middle of the night, leaning into the cold Jedhan wind, escaping from a life that had loved him warmly with two hands and looked into him with blue eyes even if they were blind in the normal sense of the word. He kissed peace goodbye while it slept, the coward’s way, stealing into the night without a backward glance because if he had lingered, if he had hesitated at all, then he would have never have been able to move. No, he would have remained wrapped around Chirrut but slowly disintegrating, slowly turning into nothing more than smoke from the tight clench of anger in his gut, the mounting waves of despair. These are things he did not want to burden Chirrut with so he fled, and now Baze has no idea whether his plan worked at all.

How selfish he was to leave a blind man alone in a city razed and occupied just because he did not want his hurt heart to be a burden. But Baze Malbus has never been good at reaching out, at asking for help, at doing anything but shouldering everything anyone will give him. He has never learned to share the weight, to even consider that there might be something too heavy for his shoulders, too large for his hands. He is a mountain of a man, after all, built of muscle and stone, drenched in blood and death now. An angered giant rising from the ground to lay waste to those who dared disturb his rest, destroy his world. It wafts off him, waves of it, the killing, the blood, the despair, and no one dares draw near to him.

Even among the mercenaries he is alone, and Baze is fine with this fact. He has been alone before, and he will be alone again. It does not hurt if he doesn’t take the time to think about it. Instead he learns everything he can about the guns stored in the ship until he can break all of them down, clean them, and put them back together again faster than anyone else. While blindfolded. He could thank Chirrut for this trick if he took the time to think about it, but he shoves that away, down, somewhere it will not hurt him as much. Nevertheless it is a trick that his companions like, and they often call out to him to come and show off when they drink late into the night. Sometimes Baze will humor them, when the hissing in his mind is at its worst, but most of the time he remains on his own, quiet, alone. Some of the others think he is mute, and that is another untruth he does not argue. Especially if it encourages them to leave him alone.

At night he counts his breaths to keep his mind from wandering to places it shouldn’t go. It doesn’t work, it never does, and yet he does it anyway just in case, one day, it might. 

They are a loosely connected team of outlaws, stealing, killing, destroying targets. Baze never asks for details other than what he is meant to do because he doesn’t want to know. Knowing has always hurt. The facts make things real, and Baze is floating in a world of unreality as much as he can, lost in a haze of moving from one thing to another, seeing the same people but never learning names, trying to forget eyes and mouths and the way that they laugh. He is a mountain. Mountains don’t care about what lies around them, he tells himself. Mountains have no more thought for a tree or a bird than for anything else. He forgets that the wind and water can wear mountains down, that animals can carry bits of a mountain away, piece by piece over time, until there is nothing left of the mountain at all.

And, of course, mountains do not count their breaths in the darkness, willing themselves to forget hands on their face, lips pressed smooth and laughing against their mouth, warmth, and love. Mountains are stone. He will make himself a stone. One day. If not this day, then the next or the one after or the one after. On and on and on. He will persist until he succeeds. In this, as in so many other things, he is failing, but Baze Malbus knows how to fail. He excels in that. 

“What are you running from? What are you doing here?” one of the other mercenaries asks, a woman with thick hair and a facial marking that runs from her forehead down below her shirt. They are in the middle of a cantina, waiting for the group’s leader to return with the assignments for the next round of missions, and the air is thick of noise but her voice is still more than audible.

Baze cannot recall if she has ever heard him speak before so he makes a flurry of hand gestures her way that mean nothing and decides to let her interpret them as she wants. The only response is a sharp laugh that might have been pretty in the past but now just sounds like glass shattering around them, the hum of a blaster charging, and then she returns to her drink. They wait the rest of the time in silence, and the woman does not look at him again. 

There is nothing personal in his room. Baze has his clothes, his weapons, the bed, but nothing else. The others, he knows, buy things--trinkets, rocks, dolls--to take home to families that are waiting or to lay on graves as tribute to what has been lost. Still more bring things from home to scatter around their quarters, pictures or maybe a scrap of silk, jewelry. These small sentimentalities remind him that these are people who are still clinging to something, and he tries not to notice because he doesn’t want the heaviness of that realization. He does not want to see them soft and smiling, reminiscing about a brother or lover or friend. Those are words he especially cannot stand to hear because they bring the memories crashing like a wave over the stone cold expression of his face, which reminds him that water can etch rivulets in a mountain, divots that trail from the corners of his eyes down his cheek to drip off his chin. 

Baze is a stone, and he will not cry.

Those are the nights when he counts his breaths aloud, his voice echoing around the room until it no longer sounds like him, until it is light and bubbling, laughter at the tips, and then it is someone else’s voice, and he lies awake all night long because dreaming after he has heard that memory voice will only result in more pain. 

One of their missions involves a stakeout. Baze and another man settle into an abandoned storehouse across the way from another that has been rigged with explosives and wait, watching, so that they can determine when all the targets are inside. They take shifts, though Baze sleeps even worse in company, wakes in fits and starts. The other man, whose name he will never allow himself to remember, also speaks Jedhan, and that is the most painful thing that has happened to him in months. It hurts more than the half dozen injuries he has sustained during that period of time, and he keeps putting his hands over his ears when he tries to sleep in an attempt to block it out because the man likes to ramble to himself quietly, constantly. And who does that remind him of but bright blue eyes and soft warm hands and the press of lips, the smoothness of skin lingering against his in the stillness. The box in his mind is rapidly filling like a bucket catching water. At some point the surface tension will break, and it will overflow. Everything will be drenched.

Baze tries not to think about how water can get into mountains, find ways into cracks and crevices in the stone, the way it can pool, forgotten and silent, until the cold comes and it freezes, cracking everything wide open. Yet he also cannot count aloud in the darkness with the murmured Jedhan filling the air. So he just turns onto his back and watches the ceiling, the way that the lights filter in and splash across it, the pictures it draws. The light is blue, and he tries not to make the easy associations that he always makes with blue, but it presses at him, heavy handed, like a staff to the chest, like a staff sweeping him off his feet and onto the ground, like laughter above him, and a hand reaching down to help him up when it is over. Like a kiss.

Blue. Blue is his favorite color, and Baze never considered himself the type of man to have a favorite color until he did. When he realized it, it was so obvious that he almost started crying he was laughing so hard. Or maybe it was the other way around. Now he avoids the color as much as possible because of what it means, the memories that it brings swirling to the surface of his mind, his heart. It is a distraction. Baze cannot be distracted here. Especially if he ever means to return.

Does he ever mean to return? It is a question that rises up to the forefront of his mind often. It swims across his vision, lazy, when he counts his breaths at night, presses on his chest like a weight. It is something that he does not know how to answer because with every passing day, every lost second, he is sure that Chirrut moves further away from him, and the amount of blood that drenches him grows thicker. One day Baze imagines he will wake up and be unable to move because of the blood encasing his limbs. It will cling, thick, clotted, holding him down, dragging him under. He will take his last breath and breathe in nothing but the metallic tang of blood. His lungs will fill the way his soul has filled, and he will drown there, slowly. And he will have earned every moment of it.

Baze scrubs his hands over his face unable to unsee the blue light dancing across the ceiling, unable to drown out the words that crowd the air. When he is weak, he lies to himself and says that all he wanted to do was make things easier for Chirrut, not infect him with his soul sickness, but it is more than that. Baze wanted to run, and he wanted to hurt those who had hurt him, those who took the temple, who took Jedha, who took his faith. He thought this would help. It has not helped. He is not sure what, if anything, will help. Vengeance was on his tongue when he left, it stained his lips, and he was cautious about kissing Chirrut when he slipped away, not wanting to leave the taste in his mouth, corrupt the only true blue thing still on Jedha. 

Now, as he lies on the ground, he wonders if he managed it. He wonders if what he had meant to be an act of protection was just as much an act of violence as anything that the Empire did to them. These are the questions that he has always had a hard time answering. Once he would have taken them to Chirrut, let Chirrut talk in his floating, teasing, ethereal way as he braided his hair, settled hands on his back to smooth away all the tension. These days the worries are just millstones, hairshirts, penance scarred across his skin from skirmishes that get too close. Once upon a time Baze Malbus was a hand to hand fighter, but he left that in the gutters of Jedha along with his own staff as he walked from the home he shared with the man he loved and to the mercenary ship.

Baze Malbus touches no one, and no one touches him. All of the deaths carved into his soul have been accomplished with guns. There is no hand to hand in him anymore. There are no hands fit to touch him save the two he is running from, and he does not deserve them now.

On the other side of the room, the pitch of the Jedhan words rises, the other man calls for him to take his shift, and Baze is almost grateful to rise, to gain the silence that comes when the other sleeps. In that this man does not remind him of Chirrut because his love would dream talk constantly. It used to help him get to sleep, the warmth of Chirrut beside him, the bubbling stream of nonsensical words forming a barrier around them. Baze crosses the room, heavy armor on, heavy gun strapped to his back, always at the ready. He takes his place, and the other man nods, once, before he goes to sleep. It only takes a moment for silence to reign.

Blue light continues to spill in through the window, falling over the toes of his boots like a hand, like a sign. Baze moves his feet backward until it can no longer illuminate him, what he has become. He is beneath blue these days, would stain it red, some muddy shade of purple, dark like dried blood on flagstones. When they can finally blow the building, he manages a sigh of relief just to escape the flickering fingers of blue light.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night when he has managed to slip into a haze, Baze wonders what he looks like in the Force now. Loss and despair and anger can change someone, he knows that because of his learnings, because of the fact that, once, he was a Guardian of the Whills. He left his faith in the dirt, but that doesn’t mean he has forgotten it. It has a taste, and a smell, and a solidity that will never fade from him. It marks his being, his knowledge, as darkly as any tattoo he has ever seen. Maybe his cannot be seen, but it remains. It is not something that Baze can ever wash away, not completely. 

When he first left, he thought he could feel Chirrut scrabbling at him through the Force, trying to get to him, but Baze cannot be sure whether or not that was just his own mind playing tricks on him or a true thing. He imagines how Chirrut reacted when he awoke to find him gone and none of the ideas are good. None of them do anything but make his stomach twist. He promised love forever and then walked away, leaving Chirrut in a world unknown to them both. That is a heavier weight on his heart than any amount of thick blood, and he does not know if there would be any way to pay penance for it. He still loves Chirrut. He always will. That is one thing that will not change no matter how far he travels, no matter what sights he sees.

One of the things that Baze regrets is that Chirrut will never know the places he visits because Chirrut will never leave Jedha. They had the discussion, among many others, before Baze left. He would have taken Chirrut with him. He would have followed Chirrut if he had an idea of something else to do. But Chirrut was adamant in needing to stay in NiJedha, to continue on as its protector, and Baze simply couldn’t manage it another day. 

When he stands on a new planet, when he takes in a new sight, heavy trees or the first flakes of snow or rivers that dance or even blistering sand, he wants to be able to go back into the ship, pull Chirrut to him and tell him about all the little details. He wants to share, but there is no one to share with. So he holds it inside, puts it in that box, which has not overflowed but has simply gotten larger, bigger, huge enough to swallow everything he shoves into it. Baze wonders if it is a black hole or if it will allow everything he crams it full of to escape again one day, when he is ready for it.

For now, though, he just stands on the surface of an ice planet, breathing into the air and watching it escape his mouth in clouds. Everything is cold and bright and blistering. The light off the ice is so intense that they are all wearing goggles so that they do not go blind from the glare. The ice is so thick that it is blue, and this is the first time he has been able to really look at the color without feeling like his insides are cracking open. For a moment, he forgets that he is a blood drenched mountain of a man, an angry, woken giant looking to smash as many other worlds as he can touch. For a moment, he is nothing other than a lover of blue.

It is not a moment that fades away slowly and sweetly. No, it is a moment broken by the sharp bark of the mercenary leader as she calls his name, and he turns swiftly on his heel to see what she wants, leaving the blue behind him without even a goodbye. Like before. His feet leave deep prints in the show, pressing too hard against the ground. Baze Malbus has always been an easy man to track, always walking too heavy, leaving not just the tracks of his feet but his burdens in his wake.

Baze is the only member of the team who does not take leave. The others come and go. He can almost count on them like a chrono. They return home or take time off on leisure planets, spend a fortnight in a cantina. Because of this he knows all the regulars after a time, though he still tries not to learn faces or names. No, instead he remembers how one shoots a little to the left or how another is proficient with explosives, how one is always wrapped in two jackets or another takes rocks from any planet they land on. These details are almost more harmful than normal ones, but he cannot banish them from his mind altogether, cannot just walk with ghosts.

The regulars know better than to ask him questions, especially any that are not related to the mission at hand. When new people join their team, he is quick to leave the room if they become curious with questions or hands. Baze has never understood why people want to touch him, and that has only increased with the passage of time. His hair is long now, dirty and matted, not a home for whatever precious trinkets Chirrut would put there, no longer brushed or pulled back or cared for. Baths are an infrequent luxury that he does not often pay for because there are better uses for those credits, which he funnels back to Jedha in whatever ways he can. Yes, some of them find their way to Chirrut, though he has no way of knowing whether or not the man uses them. He would not be surprised if he simply gave them all away. So he is dirty, and he smells, and his face is covered with a thick beard. He glares, and does not speak and is covered with armor and weapons, both physical and metaphorical. Yet, still, someone will be drawn to him, and he will have to make it obvious with his body language and his eyes that he is not interested.

There is only one person that Baze has been interested in, and he is not sure whether or not this makes him less than other people or not. He was raised to be a Guardian, after all. He was raised to give himself to a faith and a temple and a purpose. So it never worried him that he seemed to lack the stirrings of the flesh that the older boys talked about when he was young. He simply wrote it off as his dedication to the faith, that it was the will of the Force. When he felt something twist, sharply, painfully, desperately, in his gut one day for Chirrut, it took him aback. He had known Chirrut forever, why was this happening now? Why hadn’t it ever happened with anyone else? Could it happen with anyone else? 

Of course once Chirrut had kissed him, once they had wrapped themselves around each other, he no longer cared whether it could happen with anyone else because he was happy with what he had been given. He had thanked the Force for allowing him to have devotion, passion, for two things when he used to think it would only ever be the one, which would have been enough, but he was so glad to have both gifts.

Now he has nothing but a habit of counting his breath in the dark to try and fall asleep. It has been years, and it has not gotten any easier. By now Baze has accepted that it is never going to get any easier, but he is a man of routine, always has been, so he continues to count anyway.

Some missions are not easy. Baze is in a firefight that has erupted after a heist went wrong when suddenly his face is wet. He is so involved in finishing what he is doing that he takes no real notice of it, barely even acknowledges it until they are done, back in the ship and someone finally looks at him and gasps, gesturing at his face. When he swipes at what he thinks will be mud or water, he pulls back fingers covered in dark red. Baze allows the sterile touch of the medic as he sews the cut up as he has sewn up many other cuts on Baze’s body over the years. Once he has finished, Baze traces his fingers over the stitches and wonders whether Chirrut will recognize him if he returns home.

That night he counts the stitches instead of his breaths and manages to slip to sleep much faster than normal, though it is anything but peaceful. 

Baze dreams. He wanders the empty streets of NiJedha, stands knocked over and empty, houses on fire around him, curtains snapping in the breeze, singed at the edges. There are no bodies on the ground, but there are impressions, the stains of blood left on the paving stones. He recalls running down these streets as a boy, calling out to his friends, calling out to Chirrut, on the rare days when they were released from the temple and allowed to act like children instead of small masters. A bowl of rice has smashed against the ground, the grains spilled everywhere, but when he looks closer they undulate until he moves quickly away. No one lingers, alive or dead. He is the only man in the city, a city that he always knew was large but that never felt like it until this moment, alone.

He is wearing his initiate robes, they are beige and cream and tan and rust, colors of the sand, colors of the city. They are light and breezy. It is not a good day, but Baze feels lighter without the weight of the armor, without his repeater cannon on his back, on his arm. For the first time in a long while it feels like he can move again, it feels like he can breathe without worrying about something crushing him. It does not last. Nothing good ever does it seems.

There is a footfall along the streets, just past the block where he is, and he moves towards it, wants to catch it, see who it is. He knows who it is. But he needs to confirm that. He needs to see him. No matter how he runs, no matter how he tries, he never catches the other. The footsteps remain out of reach, always circling, always a breath away. After what feels like hours, Baze crashes to his knees, panting, in the sand and the dirt and the detritus of the forgotten, fallen city. That, of course, is when the footsteps find him.

The man in front of him is no longer a man. He is kyber, through and through, solid, crystalline and blue. The light glimmers off of him the way that it catches on snowflakes, dazzling and dangerous. Baze puts his hands over his eyes and weeps a torrent of sorrow onto the ground in front of him. Chirrut, all kyber, as strong as anything in the universe now, utterly and completely beyond his reach, just lingers there, sparkling. 

Eventually Baze cries out all the moisture in his body, turns to stone, turns to dust, blows away.

Baze wakes with a start, a truncated cry in the darkness, chest heaving, covered in sweat. For a moment, he has no idea where he is. His face aches, his heart aches, his soul is splintering. Everything is splintering. There is a crack in the mountain, water has gotten in, and it is freezing. He wraps his arm around his body, fingers tight on his upper arms and counts his breaths to slow his heart, calm himself. It takes longer than it should. Baze does not sleep anymore that night. Every time he closes his eyes, all he can see is blue. 

The leader looks surprised when he speaks as though she, too, has forgotten that he can. Baze does not remember if she is the same one he spoke with when he came on board anymore. Years have passed, and it is possible that this woman has never heard his voice before today. She thanks him for his service, makes sure that his credits are correct, and assists him in finding passage back to Jedha. Baze tells no one he is leaving, and he has nothing to take with him that is not already strapped to his back. One day he is there, and the next he is heading back to the broken place that means more to him than the entire universe put together, wondering what he will find when he gets there, whether everything has broken as much as he fears.

It feels like there are shards of kyber in his throat or sand, something making it close up, and his stomach twists in a way that is similar to that first pang of desire he felt for Chirrut. Baze folds and unfolds his hands in his lap and waits. The shuttle is old, and the journey takes longer than it should. Baze realizes that he has gathered all these stories, all these places to tell Chirrut about, but that he doesn’t know the names of any of them. He has been so careful about not learning names, not making ties, that his mind is full of images and noises and impressions but so very little that is concrete.

Unlike the mercenary ship, this one will not land on Jedha at night. The captain fears the winds and the darkness and the tiny spaces of the cramped city so Baze spends a night pacing the halls, gazing at his moon out of the window, the closest he has been in years and yet still separated despite all of that. He wonders if Chirrut can sense him now, if the Force has lit him up like a beacon, like a star. But, no, he is dark and tarnished, he is covered in blood and desperation. Surely the Force is dark around him now, a cloud. Surely he is nothing but a blight on an otherwise bright landscape. 

It is the longest night he has ever known. 

When he finally disembarks the next morning, he feels even worse. He is exhausted, his eyes burn, the stitches in his face hurt, and he cannot recall when he ate or drank last. The only thing he can think of is blue, of seeing Chirrut, of making sure that Chirrut is okay. And then. Then what?

He pauses and falters, has to brace himself against a building because he never got that far, never got to the step beyond checking on Chirrut. He cannot imagine that the other man will welcome him back with open arms. It has been too long, and he left in such a cowardly way. Baze has never been good at thinking on his feet when it comes to his emotions. He is good in a fight, excellent at predicting what people will do, where they will be. When they were Guardians, Chirrut said it was because the Force was strong with them both. Baze just thinks it is luck and skill. 

When it comes to people, when it comes to himself, Baze is usually oddly adrift, not sure what to do or how to proceed. He loved Chirrut from a distance for four months before the younger initiate found him, backed him up to a wall and kissed him until they were both so out of breath that they saw stars. Chirrut has always been the one to lead in this way, and Baze should have plotted out a plan before coming back to NiJedha. Now that he is part of the crushing crowds again, it is not going to take long for Chirrut to find him. Hiding from Chirrut here, of all places, is a lost cause.

In the end, he does not have to go far. Baze barely makes it down two streets before he hears the voice in the air, a voice he would know anywhere, because it is lodged in the metal black hole box, it is caught in the strings of his heart. It is mirth and lightness at the edges, but Baze knows it well enough to hear that this does not go all the way through. There is a hollowness at the center, and he feels even smaller, thinking that he might have contributed to that vastness in some way. Despite this gnawing concern, he follows the voice, which does not recede or vanish. He follows it until it is on the other side of a wall that he cannot bring himself to look around. Instead he just lingers there, repeat blaster on the ground, back against the wall, fingers pressed to the stitches in his cheek, listening to the rise and the fall of his lover’s voice, though his memory plays other words over the standard sermon of the Force that is being doled out to the marketplace.

As the day grows short, it begins to get cold, the winds blowing strong and chill off the desert. Baze considers hiding or leaving or just walking out into the desert and sinking into the sand the way that the statues have over the years. That has never been his way either. And now that he is close enough to hear Chirrut, close enough to see him if he could just find the courage to look, he is transfixed, held in place, stuck. Instead he just waits, back pressed to the wall. If Chirrut has not moved from their rooms, then he will pass this way to return to them, and that is what Baze is banking on. Just the chance to see him. 

Just the chance to see if Chirrut knows he is there.

He hears the staff against the stones before he sees him. Baze feels like he can hear everything in the world now, but most of all he can feel the rush of blood through his body, the hurried, hitching beat of his heart, the way the air catches in his throat. Stepping away from the wall, he puts the blaster cannon back on, and waits. By the time he sees the hem of a robe, black with a hint of red, he is sure that eons have passed. When he catches the blue of Chirrut’s eyes, brighter than anything his memory ever managed to give him, he almost sobs, has to stop his mouth with a closed fist.

Despite all of this, those sightless eyes train themselves on him, and Chirrut’s mouth is a line, tight, though Baze cannot tell if it is from anger or hurt. Whichever it is he wants to wipe it from his lover’s mouth, but he does not deserve to touch him. Like a mountain, he cannot move. Like a mountain, he is being changed from without, as Chirrut reaches, silent for once, to catch his wrist with his fingers and tug insistently. The grip is stronger than anything he has ever known, and he fears that Chirrut has already turned to kyber in his absence, but he follows anyway, a half step behind, head down not only because of his shame but also because looking up might blind him.

The distance to the rooms they used to share, which Chirrut still inhabits, is short, but it takes forever to cross and yet not enough time at all. Baze knows that he should use the time to put together what he will say, how he will ask for forgiveness. He does none of this. The entire walk back all he can do is watch Chirrut’s careful feet and think about the strength behind them, the way that he has seen this man take people down effortlessly with just his feet alone, laughing all the while. Baze has yet to hear Chirrut laugh, and he wonders if he is the reason for Chirrut turning to kyber, if it was necessary for him to turn hard because of the steps that Baze has taken, the years that he has wasted. 

And they are wasted, those years. There is no getting them back. Thousands of moments, kisses, touches, words, whispers, memories lost because he slipped away in the middle of the night and spent all that time throwing himself at death in a hundred different forms. A man with a kind of death wish, the death wish of the heart more than anything, and now his heart feels twisted all over again. Nothing has changed. He feels no better for having escaped to the sky, lived in the belly of a ship in silence for years. It didn’t solve anything. All it did was leave him beaten and worn, tired, scarred. Now there are physical manifestations for the wounds on his soul. Is that it then? Was the entire thing just a long journey to self destruction? How sad and ignoble of him. Especially the thought of leaving Chirrut for something as small as all that.

When they enter the room, Chirrut finally drops his wrist, leaves him at the threshold as though he is unwilling to lead him any further, as though what he does now is no longer of any consequence. Or it is a test to see if Baze will run again. It can be difficult to tell with Chirrut, especially when he is as silent as he is now. Baze closes the door behind him and secures it. There is a hesitation in him for a moment before he slides the repeater canon off, leaving the weapons on the floor, followed by the armor. It only takes a handful of minutes before he is standing there in nothing but a flight suit, feeling very vulnerable without the assortment of protection that he has been wearing for years. 

With everything strewn on the floor around him, with the weight off his back, he feels more than anything the rush of all the other burdens he has heaped onto himself, the pressing heaviness of the deaths that he remembers, all of them, will never forget. He is surprised that his hands do not drip blood onto the floor. He is surprised that he is not so Force stained that Chirrut chases him into the desert. Chirrut still has not done anything. He stands, back to him, silent, strong as kyber and maybe as sharp now too. 

Baze drops to his knees, and the sound is harsh in the small room. His breath comes out in a rush as if it is the first true exhale he has managed in a long time. “Chirrut, I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s for everything. Everything that he has done. Everything that he didn’t say. All the blood he has brought in, all the sins he has committed, all the times he never came home. The fact that he left home at all.

Chirrut finally turns, and his face is stony, a face that Baze recognizes even with the mouth set in such a line. He remembers seeing it when they would spar, when he would get the upper hand unexpectedly, there would be that moment of determination, of slightly simmering anger before Chirrut would cover it with a smile and then prove that he was the better fighter. Again. His sigh seems loud enough to rattle the glasses on a small table as he crosses to where Baze is and settles himself on the ground as well.

Baze cannot tear his eyes away from Chirrut, drinks him in, and it has been so long. In his mind, nothing about Chirrut has changed so he never added in wrinkles or slight scars, never considered that time would move the same for Chirrut as it did for him. All these little changes that he missed and now he wants to memorize them before this breaks like glass in his hands. Other than the sterile hands of the medic, Baze has not been touched in years so when Chirrut’s fingers first lift, he actually flinches back and away from them for a moment, and does not miss how that motion brings concern stark across Chirrut’s forehead. 

“Baze,” Chirrut says, and it means so many things, the way it always does, that Baze is afraid he’ll miss one of them because he is just so relieved that Chirrut will still even let it fall from his lips. More than anything, though, Baze knows that it means Chirrut needs to see him so he presses forward, letting the tips of those elegant fingers brush his face.

When Chirrut’s hands touch his face, cradle it, he shudders, pressing closer to the caress, needing it. He spent so many nights trying to fight the memory back, push it into the darkness so that he would not feel as utterly ruined as he does now. The fingers are steady, careful, and deliberate. Baze watches Chirrut’s features to try and gauge a reaction to the changes but nothing flickers there at all. The eyes are blue, fixed, stoic, and his mouth still a line. Kyber. 

Then the fingers trace across the stitches and everything changes. All of the cold, all of that thick blue ice falls away. Dismay dances across Chirrut’s face, and terror seems to prick at the edges of his eyes. His touch immediately gentles as he counts the stitches and then does it again. And then again as though he cannot stand to look anywhere else. Maybe he is hoping that it will disappear under his fingers if he keeps touching. Maybe he thinks smoothing that one injury away will fix everything in Baze that has broken. 

Baze does not know, but he knows that watching Chirrut’s face as his fingers trace it is wringing him open inside, it’s like everything that he stuffed into that black hole has started to come up all at once, and he is caught in the torrent. The surface tension is breaking.

“Still beautiful. No matter what has happened,” Chirrut says. “Still beloved.”

The downpour starts. Baze weeps as the hurts of the forgotten years move over him. He is drowning in it, slowly, except that there are strong, capable hands that have caught him and are holding him up, and there is that voice, the one he tried to chase away in the dark by counting his breaths, that is whispering solid comforts to him. And Baze Malbus weeps openly, he cries into the hands that have known him at his best and his worst, he cries into the hands that are strong as kyber but not sharp, not with him. 

Baze weeps, and he does not turn to stone or dust. He does not blow away on the Jedhan wind.


End file.
